The twenty days of Turin

HORROR ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE. In the introduction to Philip Fracassi's first collection of short fiction, BEHOLD THE VOID (JournalStone, $29.95), Laird Barron writes: "Horror and weird fiction are ascendant a decade and a half into the 21st century; an abundance of market opportunity and artistic talent has inspired a surge of creativity unrivaled in the modern days of the genre." Although it isn't clear precisely what Barron means here - aren't "an abundance of . . . talent" and "a surge of creativity" kind of the same thing? - his enthusiasm, for both horror in general and Fracassi in particular, is unmistakable, and his words carry some weight: Barron was himself the genre's hot kid 10 years ago and is now, after a bunch of nominations and awards, practically an éminence grise. By "modern days" he appears to mean since the 1970s and '80s, a period he calls "the heyday of North American category horror" (while citing, among other touchstones, a couple of novels written in the '50s and '60s). So is something truly new happening in horror ("and weird") fiction now? And is Philip Fracassi its current avatar? To the first of those questions, I'd say maybe. To the second, probably not. Fracassi's work has many virtues: He builds his horrific tales slowly and carefully, with some attention to the nuances of character; his powers of description are formidable; and he's especially skillful at creating, and sustaining, suspense. Quite a few of his most effective stories, in fact, are of the race-against-the-clock type, his proficiency at which may reflect his background as a Hollywood screenwriter. His latest novella, SACCULINA (JournalStone, paper, $9.95), begins with a sentence - "The boat was too small" - that obviously recalls a rather famous line from "Jaws," and the story itself navigates a similar narrative course, with a slightly larger cast of human characters (five guys on the doomed vessel rather than three) and an exponential increase in monsters: not one big mean shark, but thousands and thousands of tiny, voracious barnacles. (A sacculina, by the way, is a real creature, charmingly defined online by one scholar as a "crabcastrating parasite that zombifies its prey.") The story is exciting, and terrifically scary. But it doesn't feel new. That whiffof familiarity clings to most of the nine stories in "Behold the Void," whose casts of monstrous characters include witches, homicidal madmen, ghosts, a shape-shifting mother and an evil public swimming pool. The most original piece in the book, I think, is one called "The Horse Thief," whose title miscreant winds up changed, irrevocably, by the horse he steals and means to sell for slaughter. The story is the strongest embodiment of what seems to be the book's prevailing theme: our human attraction, often fatal, to the unknown. In "The Horse Thief" the hero succumbs not to the lure of something dark and deadly, but to the mysterious spirit of a great animal, and although it would be a stretch to say that the story ends happily it does conclude with a wholly unexpected burst of lyricism, a moment of transcendence. "The Horse Thief" is certifiably "weird," I guess. But it is, of all Fracassi's stories and novellas, perhaps the one that least deserves the name of horror. The short fiction of another up-and-comer, Bracken MacLeod, feels far more horrific to me, although there's almost nothing of the supernatural in his superb new collection, 13 VIEWS OF THE SUICIDE WOODS (ChiZine Publications, paper, $17.99). In the opening story, "Still Day: An Ending," a woman lies in a marsh, obscured by trees, just offthe highway, as bumper-to-bumper traffic passes a hundred yards away. She is dead, with "deep red cuts rent in her flesh," perhaps by her own hand. A blue heron nests nearby; a snake slides past; algae and insects are everywhere. "And she lay waiting," MacLeod writes, "for that one set of eyes to glance toward the teeming life all round and see her. All her life waiting to be seen. And still invisible." Those chilling sentences end the story, all three pages of it. "Still Day" isn't a traditional tale of horror, and neither, really, are any of the 18 other stories in this book. There are pieces here that nod to distinguished ancestors like Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" - but none of those are conventional things-that-go-bump-in-the-night horror, either. What those stories, and MacLeod's, have in common is a stifling sense of fatality, of people trapped in situations over which they have no control. And the power of inescapable fate is the essence of horror: the feeling for which every monster, large or small, is just a metaphor. MacLeod's fiction is full of traps - some physical, some psychological, none easy to wriggle free of. His 2016 novel "Stranded" is about a polar expedition stuck in the ice, and many of the strongest stories in "13 Views of the Suicide Woods" are about confinements of various kinds: There's one called "The Texas Chainsaw Breakfast Club, or I Don't Like Mondays," in which a group of high-school kids are taken prisoner by a demented teacher; another ("Reminisce") whose hero, a homeless veteran, is kidnapped by an apparently ordinary suburban couple; and several more in which characters are maneuvered (or maneuver themselves) into places where their options are, let's say, severely limited. Sticklers for genre classification might prefer to label the stories in this book something other than "horror" - "dark fiction," maybe, or noir - but what's the point of quibbling? Noir, I've always thought, is only horror without the metaphors. The affinity may be more evident in the movies than in literature. The visual style of film noir, with its shadowy, high-contrast blacks and whites, is pretty much identical to that of the classic horror movies of the '20s, '30s and '40s; the same director (Jacques Tourneur) and the same cinematographer (Nicholas Musuraca) made "Cat People" and "Out of the Past," after all. MacLeod's characters, who are often working- class people with dangerously low expectations of life, remind me of the doomed protagonists of Cornell Woolrich's novels and stories, those hapless folks for whom everything, elaborately and implacably, sooner or later goes wrong. Sounds like horror to me. If there's anything that has changed significantly in the horror landscape of the past 30 or 40 years, it's the increased fluidity of the genre's conventions and its readers' expectations. Monsters are no longer required, unnatural creatures like vampires and werewolves and even zombies are no longer necessarily the villains, and "horror" now seems less a literary (or cinematic) form than an attitude, like rock 'n' roll - which has, at least since the punk revolution of the 1970s, embraced the genre warmly. Josh Malerman, the author of the delirious new novel BLACK MAD WHEEL (Ecco, $26.99), is relatively new to horror fiction - his first book, "Bird Box," was published three years ago - but he's a rock veteran: He has been the lead singer of the Detroit band the High Strung for over 20 years. Philip Tonka, the hero of "Black Mad Wheel," is the piano player of a Motor City rock 'n' roll outfit called the Danes, who as the novel begins are a dozen years past the end of their service in World War II and enjoying the freedom, money and fame their music has brought them. Into their idyllic little world, a studio they call Wonderland, one day comes a high-ranking military official who wants them to listen to a tape recording of a mysterious sound. He wants them, for a price, to help the Army locate and identify it; this sound, it seems, has the power to neutralize any kind of weapon, and perhaps to make people disappear. We know it's bad, because in the book's first scene Philip wakes from a coma in a hospital bed, months after the expedition, with practically every bone in his body crushed and his bandmates gone; for most of the rest of the story he tries to remember what happened, and to figure out what the military has in mind for him now. It's a good setup for a sciencefiction horror novel, and Malerman, alternating past and present, keeps the action galloping along nicely, a long jam with a seductive, infectious rhythm. But in the time-honored traditions of both horror and rock, things get wilder and stranger as the big finish approaches: Malerman's story takes flight in some head-splitting metaphysical directions. It's as if he were veering offinto a search for cosmic harmonies, the very music of the spheres, and although I couldn't quite hear it myself, I enjoyed listening to his frantic improvisations. His crash-andburn attitude can be a useful aesthetic for musicians, and for writers. It's only rock 'n' roll - or horror - but I like it. There's something of that reckless abandon, too, in Giorgio De Maria's startling THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN (Liveright, $24.95), a novel that would place its author in the vanguard of the new horror were it not for the inconvenient fact that he wrote it 40 years ago. (And the melancholy fact that he died in 2009.) Now that it has been translated into English for the first time - serviceably, by Ramon Glazov - it could, I suppose, take its place as a freshly exhumed classic from the period Laird Barron cites as the genre's heyday, except that it doesn't much resemble the horror fiction of that King-dominated time. Or, for that matter, any other. The novel is subtitled "A Report From the End of the Century" and is narrated by an unnamed man who is trying to write an account of some disturbing events of a decade earlier, which may or may not have been "a phenomenon of collective psychosis." For three weeks, it seems, large numbers of ordinary citizens of Turin began to suffer from insomnia and to wander, mute, through the streets of the nocturnal city, where some met grisly ends. Unearthly sounds (like "a terrible war cry" ), a few remember, accompanied the macabre doings; the surviving witnesses can't explain what they saw or heard. During this same nightmarish time, a new civic institution suddenly came into being, a library of anonymous personal diaries made available for perusal at the St. Cottolengo Little House of Divine Providence. The connections among these disparate spooky manifestations, all of which ended as suddenly and as inexplicably as they began, are what the narrator is attempting to discover, at least until it dawns on him that his investigation might be putting him, and his city, in danger. He senses he's being followed; he's receiving peculiar unsigned letters, to which he is expected to respond; and from time to time a nun, Sister Clotilde, pops up to issue a cryptic warning. He considers leaving the city. The novel explores the mysteries in a wandering, digressive sort of way, as if to recreate the brain-fog that grips the city in its baffling 20 days. De Maria's tone wavers, too, keeping the reader more or less continually offguard, constantly snatched back from the brink of revelation. At times, his intent seems satiric: The sleepwalking people of Turin do inevitably evoke memories of the not so distant Fascist era of Italian history, and the library feels like a metaphor for modern urban loneliness. But "The Twenty Days of Turin" is always, in its brief course, odder and stubborner than you expect it to be, defiantly resistant to interpretation. ("And," as a friend tells the narrator, "the hidden power that's being marshaled is not amused by people who resist.") All we finally know about what happened in Turin, and may again be happening, is that some ancient enmities have been reanimated, some gulf of time bridged. And in a way, that's what the novel itself does, finding 40 years later a literary environment in which it can enter our dreams more readily, with less resistance from horror readers' genre expectations. Some horror novels, though, feel timeless whenever you happen to read them, and Kit Reed's wondrous new ghost story MORMAMA (Tor, $25.99) seems to me one of those. It's a hauntedhouse tale, set in Jacksonville, Fla., in which three elderly sisters, a young single mother, her 12- year-old son and an amnesiac drifter who might be related to them all, attempt to fend offthe uneasy spirits also resident in the crumbling mansion they live in. This is a place "where the past is so thick that you can't wade through it and dust or time or something is so dense in here that it's getting hard to breathe," one character says, and that's as it should be in a ghost story, horror's most enduring form. Reed, who has been writing fiction of all kinds for nearly 60 years, certainly knows how to construct a traditional spooky tale, and she does that expertly in "Mormama," alternating different voices (some living, some not), laying out complex family relationships over several generations, managing a complicated plot and then drawing everything together in a spectacular, and unexpectedly moving, conclusion. As a genre-fluid writer of longstanding, she also knows that in every structure, no matter how solid, there has to be some give in the building materials. Reed isn't afraid to bend the form she's working in, mostly with a breezy tone and frequent flashes of spiky wit. ("Awful things grow in Florida, and they feed on the contents of these old houses.") But it doesn't break until she wants it to. With old-school horror as vigorous as "Mormama" surviving alongside the "ascendant" newer stuffin all its unseemly variety - "weird," "dark," whatever - it's tough to tell exactly where the genre's headed. But I think we're going to need a bigger boat. What are your favorite summertime horror novels? "Actually, a pair of novellas. The first is Stephen King's 'Apt Pupil,' about a teenager who becomes an apprentice to an elderly former Nazi. The other is 'Children of the Kingdom,' by T. E. D. Klein. It's the greatest New York City horror story of all time." - VICTOR LAVALLE TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

First published in Italy in 1977, De Maria's cult classic makes its English-language debut. What was behind the series of bizarre deaths labeled the 20 Days of Turin? Though some believed the unsettling period was a "dire warning signal from on high addressed to humanity," others dismissed it as just a "phenomenon of collective psychosis." Ten years after the event, De Maria's unnamed narrator pursues the truth in this subtle, enigmatic novel, which contains some eerily prescient predictions about the ways people would communicate in the Internet era. The violence began when someone, or something, killed Giovanni Bergesio, a bank employee, by slamming his body into a tree. The narrator interviews the dead man's sister, who relates that her brother was certain that two of the city's statues had switched places shortly before his death. The oddities multiply after an interview with an attorney, who reports hearing some terrifying screams at the time of Bergesio's murder that had something "gray and metallic" behind them. De Maria (1924-2009) excels at creating a growing sense of cosmic menace in this mesmerizing work of literate horror. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.